


Ivory

by spirrum



Series: Gold Heart, Silver Tongue [2]
Category: Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Fluff, what even are thedosian wedding traditions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-18 00:53:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3550034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spirrum/pseuds/spirrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day they are to marry, Hawke is the one who frets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ivory

**Author's Note:**

> I posted this on tumblr last week, but thought I could post it here as well. Just sweet fluff this time around, because I so desperately needed some.

The day they are to marry, Hawke is the one who frets.

Her hands are restless on the vanity, fingers plucking at the teeth of the ivory comb in her grasp. Her mother’s. A fine thing, meant to be put in her hair, but it would have required effort (and not a small amount of brute force), and the thought alone had given her a headache. 

Orana had thankfully relented, and so instead of the comb there are daisies in her loose braid, and the dress too is a blessedly simple thing, but the eyes gazing back from the mirror still look too hollow, and her shoulders feel rigid and thin beneath the soft silk. And Hawke feels – herself, and yet not. There is a remnant of her mother in the way her hair curls below her ear, and her father in her sharp nose. She sees her sister in the curve of her mouth, and her brother in the clear blue of her eyes. But all these things, and Hawke still feels a stranger, looking at the image of someone else, dressed in things too fine for so hard and wearied a form.

She has never been a songbird, a pretty thing perched on a low-hanging branch, small and frail and lovely and meant for lovely things. Hawke is strong hands wrapped around an apostate’s staff, palms worn with callouses from a life of ploughing fields, of herding cattle and of knowing the feel of the hard earth. If a bird of any kind, it is something else (and of course the comparison has been made in jest more times than she can count). A hawk is a hunter, proud and vigilant – a sky-warrior, her father would say with clever mirth, pointing to the circling shadows above the farmhouse.

Hawke has been all these things, and this is the person he knows, he who is to be her husband. The first time they met she felt the hunter, talons poised to strike, sharp eyes watching warily his restless prowling, the low thrum of his voice raised in anger like the boding of a storm. Vigilant, and prideful, too. But for all her pride, hers were the hands to first reach for his, steady and sure where his own faltered, uncertain not in his affection but to display it. And hers was the laughter, soft and warm in her throat, to lure the first and hesitant smile from his mouth. 

So many things has she been she’s lost count, and _what is she now?_ she wonders. When they met again, after Adamant, after Weisshaupt, after everything she’d done and failed to do, Hawke had not felt herself, and surely no bird of prey has everworn wings as ravaged as her own, feathers plucked like poultry for the cooking pot. But there’d been no change in the way he’d looked at her when she’d come back, with her new scars and her sunken eyes. Hawke feels it, the change, but she wonders sometimes if she might be the only one who sees it, too.  

The creak of the door swinging open draws her attention to the mirror, and her surprise shows in the raise of her brows; her pleasure in the small smile that greets him on his entrance. 

“You are not supposed to be here,” she tells his reflection, as he comes to stand behind her. “I hear it’s bad luck, or so tradition would have us believe.”

A brow quirks, and his amusement is a fond thing. “We are to be wed by a pirate with a cleavage cut deeper than the pockets she picks. I hardly think tradition is something we need concern ourselves with.”

Hawke laughs, a brief, almost startled sound, but offers no further protest. His unexpected company has settled some of her nerves, and she draws some strength from his presence at her back, his eyes holding hers in the mirror.

Fenris is quiet a moment before he speaks. “Orana said you’d been quiet, when she did your hair. She implied you might wish to talk.” His hand lingers by her braid, and she feels the gentle touch against her neck. 

Hawke snorts. “Am I so talkative my _silence_ arouses suspicion?”

He smiles. “As I understood, you did not make a sufficient amount of jokes.”  

“Ah,” she sighs. “Betrayed by my own wit.”

"So it would seem." There is good humour in his soft murmur, but it does not still her fretting hands, and in the mirror she sees his eyes drawn to the comb. “Something on your mind?” he asks

“You mean other than the fact that we’re a few hours from being wed?” There’s no change to his expression, and Fenris does not drop her gaze. And it’s only a heartbeat before Hawke sighs. “I feel changed,” she admits into the mirror. “Am I much changed?”

Hands come to rest on her shoulders, warm through the fabric of her dress. “It makes no difference,” he says without hesitation. “You are who you are, Hawke.”

“And who is that these days?” she murmurs, fingers closing over his. “I forget.”

She sees the curve of his strange smile. “Should I list all of your epithets?

Her groan is sincere. “I’d rather you didn’t, unless you’ve a few new ones I haven’t heard.”

He seems to consider the suggestion, playfully as it is uttered. “Wife,” he says after a lull, carefully, as though testing the word on his tongue. “If you still wish it.”

Hawke’s breath catches, holds, but her smile does not waver. “Only if you’ll still have me, whoever it is I am these days.”

His nose against her hair, and she leans into the touch. “I would not have another,” he tells her, and with the words Hawke breathes again. 

The quiet curls a comforting warmth around them, the sunlight catching in the mirror to slant off the vanity, and Hawke watches their reflection. Her eyes are still too sunken to look entirely hale, but her smile has chased some of the wrongness from the image, and she finds some of herself through the fine dress and the sunlight casting everything in tones of honeyed gold. And it does not seem such a strange picture, even with her hair full of flowers and him in an actual shirt and breeches.

“Who put you in these?” she asks then, her mirth undisguised as she turns to pluck at the fabric where it wraps around his wrist. 

He gives her a long-suffering look, but the smile ruins some of the effect. “I was told gauntlets had no place at a wedding feast.” He tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear, thumb brushing against one of the petals woven into the dark mass of her braid. “And I could ask the same.”

“Merrill picked them. I couldn’t refuse.” 

"Evidently," he says, knuckles curling gently against the nape of her neck. "You are beautiful, Hawke."

Her throat feels thick, but she finds her laughter, not a lark’s song but deeper, truer; an honest sound that carries her pleasure. “Flattery, hmm? Perhaps I should ask Orana to braid my hair with flowers every day.” But though she says it with jest in mind, there’s a flutter below her breastbone, and her hand rests, steady now on the vanity; the comb clasped between still fingers. 

With a smile, Hawke puts it away. “Well,” she declares. “I suppose I ought to marry you then, as we’re both dressed for the occasion.”

A chuckle against her hair, and his answering smile is a clever thing. “It is most convenient, I admit.” When she turns to get up, he offers her a hand, and as she closes her fingers around his Hawke feels the callouses there, hard and familiar against her own. And she feels a little more herself; a little less like bird-bones beneath human flesh, clad in feathers too fine.    

The comb sits forgotten on the vanity table and her braid lies loose and lovely in the hollow of her throat, trailing daisy-petals in their wake as they walk, her strong and weary shoulders wrapped in silk and her worn hands tucked into the warmth of his. She’s still no pretty trinket fit for finery, but she can wear her hair with daisies, she finds, and she’ll be wed with the smell of the sea in her nose and by a woman entirely liable to perform the ceremony in limerick form. And she’ll forget, at least for a moment, all she has seen and done and failed to do, and think instead of what might be; what she might be, with her scars and her tired eyes. 

 _Wife_ , she thinks, tastes the word, and the thought does not make her fret now, but smile. Mother, perhaps one day, perhaps not, but in all things she will be a partner on the path that lies obscured before them. 

And that’s all she needs to be, truly. 


End file.
